A Blue Poppy blog post by Bob Quinn
“If [man] thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.”
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980
R. Buckminster Fuller is a known name to most of my generation. He was on the cover of Time magazine; he traveled to hundreds of campuses lecturing; he was said to be the only person over 30 that the hippies trusted; he was called the first poet-saint of technology. Fuller was a pioneer of what might be called a whole systems approach to life on earth. He advised us in every endeavor to start always with the whole. What might this mean for us in Chinese medicine?
At first glance this seems like something that a Five Element practitioner would say, but I think this first glance deceives. This is advice for all of us. As I have written before, the whole is not to be arrived at through a sort of summative process. We cannot add the mental to the physical to the emotional to the spiritual and hope to arrive at a genuine whole. Of course noting these aspects of a patient’s life is better than not even taking it into account, but this is not a genuinely holistic approach.
One thing I’ve learned only gradually in my 19 years of practice is to slow myself down. Take the time before launching into treatment to develop a sense of the patient. We need to open our senses (all of them that we know, i.e., we have more senses than just five) and let impressions come in. It’s important to do this for a time before we allow language to enter in. Just let the impressions come in. Don’t rush madly into labeling these impressions as Liver or Metal or this or that. It is a sort of poetic approach to the medicine.
In koan study the logical mind is not our friend. Koans are meant to be sat with, often for years on end. A pulling-the-words-apart strategy never really yields a satisfactory understanding of the koan. We can approach each patient as a sort of koan. We do not need to analyze them; we need to see them, really see them.
“One of the great virtues of koans is they get us to think, not in an analytical way, but with our complete mind.”
Philip Kapleau, Straight to the Heart of Zen, 2001
What do we do in this time of assessment? One of my teachers simply stands at the feet and rests his hands on the ankles as a way of starting the check-in process, and after some time there will do the same at the knees, hips, ribs, shoulders, neck. One can be specific here and look for gross structural information or changes in the cranial rhythmic impulse, or one can simply let the patient-koan be and allow impressions to filter in. There will still be plenty of time for the Chinese medicine categories or cranial understanding to come into the process. Can we take a little time away from all that and allow our patient to be a koan?
We live in an age in which the logical-rational way is oversold. This kind of thinking is absolutely the best way to go in many situations—but not in all. That’s the key. It even has a role in our medicine for certain, but for the sake of our patients it had better not be the only tool we have in our bag. What is undersold in our culture, particularly in medicine, is the intuitive, the poetic, the gentle, the minimalistic. This deserves some thought on our part. Are we like a drummer with only one rhythm? How many tools do we really have in our kit? Are we blindly walking through patient after patient applying learned protocols, or do we attempt to really see those with whom we work, see them in their wholeness, see them in their koan-ness?